Summary
-- The New Yorker Former vice president Joseph R. Biden Jr. has been called both the luckiest man and the unluckiest--fortunate to have sustained a fifty-year political career that reached the White House, but also marked by deep personal losses and disappointments that he has suffered. Yet even as... Full description
Summary: |
-- The New Yorker Former vice president Joseph R. Biden Jr. has been called both the luckiest man and the unluckiest--fortunate to have sustained a fifty-year political career that reached the White House, but also marked by deep personal losses and disappointments that he has suffered. Yet even as Biden's life has been shaped by drama, it has also been powered by a willingness, rare at the top ranks of politics, to confront his shortcomings, errors, and reversals of fortune. As he says, "Failure at some point in your life is inevitable, but giving up is unforgivable. "His trials have forged in him a deep empathy for others in hardship--an essential quality as he addresses Americans in the nation's most dire hour in decades. Blending up-close journalism and broader context, Evan Osnos, who won the National Book Award in 2014, draws on his work for The New Yorker This portrayal illuminates Biden's long and eventful career in the Senate, his eight years as Obama's vice president, his sojourn in the political wilderness after being passed over for Hillary Clinton in 2016, his decision to challenge Donald Trump for the presidency, and his choice of Senator Kamala Harris as his running mate. Osnos ponders the difficulties Biden will face if elected and weighs how political circumstances, and changes in the candidate's thinking, have altered his positions. In this nuanced portrait, Biden emerges as flawed, yet resolute, and tempered by the flame of tragedy--a man who just may be uncannily suited for his moment in history |
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Physical Description: |
ix, 177 pages ; 22 cm |
Bibliography: |
Includes bibliographical references (pages 171-176). |
ISBN: |
9781982174026 1982174021 |
Author Notes: |
Evan L.R. Osnos was born on December 24, 1976 in London. He has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 2008, best known for his coverage of China. He graduated magna cum laude from Harvard in 1998. In the summer of 1999, Osnos joined the Chicago Tribune as a metro reporter, and, later, a national and foreign correspondent. He was based in New York at the time of the September 11 attacks. In 2002, he was assigned to the Middle East, where he covered the Iraq War and reported from Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Iran, and elsewhere. In 2005, he became the China correspondent. In 2008, he was part of a Chicago Tribune team that won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting. Osnos joined The New Yorker in September 2008 and served as the magazine¿s China Correspondent until 2013. Osnos has contributed to the NPR radio show This American Life and the PBS television show Frontline. He has received two awards from the Overseas Press Club and the Osborn Elliott Prize for excellence in journalism from the Asia Society. Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China (2014), Osnos' first book, follows the lives of individuals swept up in China's "radical transformation. He was a finalist for the 2015 Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction with - Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China. (Bowker Author Biography) |